She had wrapped both babies, laid them in the wheelbarrow, and started toward the only place she believed could make sick people better.
I pressed my hand over my mouth.
Then I asked where her house was.
She didn’t know the address.
But she knew the road.
She described a mailbox shaped like a barn, a long gravel driveway, and every turn she remembered making.
Two paramedics had come in from the bay.
While one of them radioed dispatch, the girl suddenly reached beneath the collar of her sweatshirt.
A small house key hung from a piece of string.
« Mommy says I can’t lose this, » she whispered.
The older paramedic, Virgil Yoder, crouched in front of her.
He was fifty-eight, big and gray-bearded, and he held out one open palm.
« Can I borrow it so we can go help her? »
She stared at the key.
Then she looked toward the hallway where her baby brother and sister had been taken.
Finally, she pulled the string over her head.
« Bring Mommy too. »
She placed the key in his hand.
Virgil closed his fist around it and ran through the ambulance doors.
The whole lobby stayed frozen, sixty people and a punch bowl, and a ribbon that no one was going to cut.
Then a hand closed around my elbow.
It was a smooth hand, with a gold Rolex.
« Marsha, » Gilbert Stroud said, very quietly. « A word. Now. »
Chapter 2: This Is a Hospital, Not a Shelter
I had one second before Gilbert Stroud steered me away from the desk.
I used it to look back.
Ginger Hensley had taken the little girl’s hand and was walking her toward the triage curtain.
« Honey, » I called. « What’s your name? »
She turned her face over her shoulder.
« Maisie. »
« Maisie what? »
« Maisie Voigt. »
The floor tilted under my shoes.
I knew that name the way you know a tooth that has been hurting for months.
Fourteen months earlier, Clayton Voigt had come through our doors on a stretcher after a tractor rolled on him on Fairlane Road.
He was thirty-four.
He spent two nights in our ICU, and then he passed away with his wife holding his hand.
Her name was Kaylee.
She was twenty-nine, and three months pregnant, and she sat in the waiting room with her little girl asleep across her lap until six in the morning, when she finally came to my window and asked me, politely, what she owed.
